That is sad. Desktop virtualization is incredibly useful. And vmware are the only one that can pull off a macos virtualization in windows host decently so far.
But workstation was for long left on the backburner - we haven't had there a lot of killer features since '07 probably. So I guess it is not a new decision.
Clarification: I mean that workstation was deprioritized by corporate, not by the team that worked on it.
Workstation was heavily developed up until, well, yesterday really.
I personally spent 2 years of my life, starting in 2008, bringing Unity to Workstation on Linux and making it work with every combination of Linux and Windows I could throw at it. That work was continued by a teammate for several years.
I spent 3 years rewriting most of the foundation, UI, and server infrastructure for Workstation 8, bringing the ability to connect to remote VMware ESXi/vSphere servers, along with the server component of Workstation 8. This work allowed VMs to be hosted on any server and accessed from any other server, and allowed VMs to be pushed between servers. 3 solid years on this feature alone, given just how much was needed to make that happen.
In the same release, we replaced the old Teams feature (a single feature that provided a multi-VM UI along with software-defined networking segments) with a series of more independent, more useful features. These were just a couple of the major features released in Workstation 8, and with all this came cleanup in the UI to keep the experience sane, not bloated.
That came out in 2011.
Workstation 9, released in 2012, came with a web-based UI for interacting with VMs called WSX (a feature I dedicated a bit over a year to). It also added UI refinement for the features that come out in Workstation 8, more remote VM support, hardware improvements (USB 3, Hyper-V, OpenGL for Linux VMs, nested/Inception-like VMs), locked down virtual machines for IT, and probably more that I can't remember.
Workstation 10 followed that a year later, and brought guest hardware support for tablets, enhancements for Windows 8 hosts, more remote VM improvements, better command line automation for remote-controlling/creating VMs, and a bunch of other things. UI-wise, it was a smaller release, but it did a lot for the hardware support.
Since then, they released 2 major versions: Workstation 11 and 12. From what I can tell, these were largely about hardware improvements and performance improvements, less about major UI changes, but there's a lot that has to happen for these improvements. Hardware improvements are crucial to keeping the VMs useful in many situations. Performance was also a focus. While building these releases, the team was also busy helping out the View team by helping them consume bits of the Workstation/Fusion codebase. They also begun development of AppCatalyst and Flex.
There's also work that happened on Player, Ace, and other things, all throughout.
So that's a lot of killer features in my opinion :) I barely scratched the surface of 8, and didn't go into all the stuff we did in 6 and 7.
We were all very proud of the product, and often spent our free time working on it. I should point out, this was not a large team by any means. It was an amazing team, though. A family. One that will survive these layoffs, one way or another.
First of all, thank you, accessing ESXi servers via vSphere has been a god send over the years (FWIW, still running relatively recent version of vSphere on an ancient 2003 Server VM ;-)).
Workstation was my go to as well for desktop development needs for many years, but switched to VirtualBox after Workstation 10. Kernel updates on Linux often broke Workstation. You needed to wait for VMware to release an update, upgrade to the next version (that would also soon lag behind latest kernels), or search for a patch over on Arch[0].
VirtualBox does the trick but Workstation's a better product.
For me killer features would have been -PCI pass trough, higher and better performing 3d driver, better work with hardware disks - that feature never quite worked on Windows at least. Remote/connect/management and so on - they are nice to have.
These features may have been prohibited by corporate management for some reason since ESXi have passtrough. And yeah - I view it from strong power user/developer/gaming angle, not sysadmin.
Hmm, I don't think management really ever forbid us from doing anything. I'll have to think about that, but that's not my recollection. It's more that we had a lot of customers in different segments wanting different things, and our own list of what we thought would make a good release, and only so much time and personnel to make things happen :)
A teammate just told us he's bummed he didn't have just a bit longer to work on Workstation, because he had a few things left he wanted to fix and rework for the next release. Our personal todo lists were so long, we could have filled another 10 releases... Shame we didn't have that opportunity.
I don't know you. I'm not remotely a VMWare customer, haven't even used VMWare Player.
It just warmed my heart that you and your team put your heart and soul to that product and loved every second of it. Thanks for doing all that hard work and doing it the way it's supposed to be done.
Great job on building what was a great product. I've been a faithful Workstation and then Fusion user for the last 10 years, and it's always been much more reliable than its clone VirtualBox.
I was already a bit troubled by the shameless yearly waves of "upgrade begging", and by VmWare clearly keeping features back to try and segment the market (especially with Fusion, because "everyone knows Apple users are rich idiots"). This final nail will likely push our company to VirtualBox for good, it's become the standard in OSS circles anyway. You did well to leave, VmWare as a company has lost direction.
Been a fusion customer for years. Its the only way to do CNC on a mac, and its always been great. It always did what it said it would do. Really the best kind of software.
Not sure why the downvote. This is common practice in many major, non-growth, global companies.
The past two eyars, MSFT have cut a large number of people annually. CSCO have been cutting a large number annually since 2011 (though this is more of a migration of staff to lower cost economies/newer focus areas). HP have a long history of annual staff cuts. Even Google has been cutting staff on an off for the last 4 years (mostly post acquisition).
